Central America

Emergency officials across Central America worked to clean up towns inundated by deadly floods and landslides, and braced for more bad weather. At least 20 people were killed and thousands evacuated in the region after days of heavy rain. The same weather system that killed 23 people in a Haitian village Friday triggered a landslide that buried 14 people in Costa Rica. In Honduras, three children and their mother drowned Saturday when an overloaded boat capsized.

Hurricane Felix killed at least 18 people and damaged thousands of homes as it passed through the remote Atlantic coast of Nicaragua. But the storm failed to produce the massive flooding many had feared in neighboring Honduras, officials said Wednesday. Little more than a day after it came ashore as a powerful Category 5 hurricane, Felix was downgraded to a tropical depression.

September 5, 2007 | Alex Renderos and Hector Tobar, Special to The Times

Hurricane Felix came ashore on Nicaragua's remote Miskito Coast early Tuesday as a Category 5 storm, damaging about 5,000 homes in the region before moving westward toward the heart of this country of 7 million people, officials said. Less than nine hours later and more than 1,600 miles away in the Pacific, a second and much weaker hurricane, Henriette, struck the resort city of San Jose del Cabo on the southern tip of Baja California, Mexico.

Mexican immigration authorities deported some of the thousands of U.S.-bound Central American migrants who were stranded near the border with Guatemala after an American-run railroad closed. Some were camped along rail lines waiting for trains that will never come. Others tried to walk hundreds of miles to the next working line and some turned themselves in to authorities.

Hilton Hotels Corp. confirmed Sunday that it had reached agreements to develop about 55 hotel properties in Russia, Britain and Central America with a group of partners. "HHC does have agreements in place to form alliances for development in the three markets outlined, which is expected to result in around 55 hotels in total," said Linda Bain, vice president of international communications for the Beverly Hills-based company.

The first place Francisco Rivera headed to after fleeing war in his native El Salvador in 1980 was the MacArthur Park area of Los Angeles. There, churches and community volunteers had created a haven of shelter, support and sustenance for war refugees like himself, then a 28-year-old poet and writer whose literary group had been targeted by right-wing death squads.

The distinguished guests from El Salvador entered this capital city with one set of police officers as bodyguards, and another set of police officers waiting to ambush them. As they drove along mountain roads, Eduardo Jose D'Aubuisson and fellow legislators were entering a trap set by rogue Guatemalan police officers at the hire of drug traffickers, officials said. Those officers believed the Salvadorans were using their diplomatic immunity to work for rival traffickers.

Central America has become a crucial way station in the billiondollar cocaine business, with traffickers shipping hundreds of tons northward from Colombia along the isthmus and increasingly infiltrating police and government agencies, U.S. and regional sources say. The recent killings of three Salvadoran legislators in Guatemala underscored the shift, intelligence sources say.